 At the press statement after the conference on Turkish Foreign Relations held in the Republic of South Africa on Wednesday October 5 2011, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that he saw Israel as a threat for its region and surrounding countries because it had atomic bomb. This gave rise to a debate on Isreali nuclear capability. Intended as a contribution to the provision of an informed-debate, this piece is a brief backgrounder on the subject.
Israel is widely accepted to be the first and only country in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons. Yet, Israel neither accepts nor denies its nuclear capability, a policy known as nuclear ambiguity or opacity. Thereby, Israel avoids pressures and restrictions that could have originated from nonproliferation treaties. Israel does not allow any publication of factual Israel-based information on its nuclear capability. Thus, no official Israeli information or declaration -save Shimon Peres’ statements- is available on the issue. This piece is based upon widely-known open sources on the subject-matter.
Regarding the American and Israeli understanding on the policy of nuclear opacity, Avner Cohen highlights that,
Opacity was first codified in a secret accord between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel in September 1969. As long as Israel did not advertise its possession of nuclear weapons, by either declaring it had them or testing them, the United States agreed to tolerate and shield Israel’s nuclear program. Ever since, all U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers have reaffirmed this policy — most recently, President Obama in a July White House meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which Mr. Obama stated, “Israel has unique security requirements. ... And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine [its] security interests.”[1]
Avner Cohen's book Israel and the Bomb is taken to be one of the most authoritative sources on the subject.[2] It is based on various non-Israeli reports and publications “including the so-called Vanunu testimony, the disclosure made on 5 October 1986 in the London Sunday Times, based on a testimony of Mordechai Vanunu, a technician who had worked at the Dimona nuclear facility and subsequently broke his oath of secrecy.”[3]Another source is the statement of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres who publicly declared that “Israel built a nuclear option not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo”.[4]
Israel’s search for an effective deterrent started at the founding of the state in 1948. Many Jewish scientists immigrated to Palestine in the thirties and forties. Among them, Ernst David Bergmann became the director of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and one of the leading figures in Israel’s endeavors to develop nuclear weapons. As an advisor of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Bergmann advised that nuclear energy could substitute for Israel’s poor natural resources and small military manpower of the time.[5] Necessary institutions started to take shape from then on, yet no nation was able to develop nuclear capability without support from major powers. In Israeli case, France was the foreign nuclear supplier that helped develop Israeli nuclear capability.[6]There are also credible sources that document the US reactions and the evolution of US nonproliferation policy with regard to Israeli nuclear aspirations.[7]
Israel, although widely recognized as possessing a sophisticated nuclear arsenal, has never openly tested nuclear weapons. There is no solid evidence that Israel has ever conducted a nuclear test though some have suggested that a large seismic event that occurred in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979 was the result of a joint South African-Israeli nuclear test.[8] Until July 1998, not even any single Israeli official made declaration that the country has nuclear weapons. At a press conference in Jordan in 13 July 1998, former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres publicly admitted, “Israel built a nuclear option not in order to have a Hiroshima but an Oslo”.[9]More recently, in further breach of nuclear opacity, Peres admitted that Israel has nuclear weapons.[10] Furthermore, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) underlines that Israel is among the three nuclear-capable states that did not sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).[11]
Israel maintained a long-standing policy of opacity or ambiguity regarding its nuclear arsenal, frequently expressed in the statement that “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East”. Nevertheless, Israel refuses to allow international inspection of its main nuclear reactor, Dimona. Israel has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), but she has not ratified it.[12] Israel is not a party to any of the major treaties governing the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). It has signed, but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). However, Israel is considered an unilateral adherent to the MTCR and has adopted national export control regulations on chemical and biological materials consistent with Australia Group standards.
On 22 May 2006, the IAEA Director General received a request submitted by the Ambassador of the Sultanate of Oman on behalf of the Arab States that are members of the Agency, for the inclusion of an item entitled “Israeli nuclear capabilities and threat” in the agenda of the 50th regular session of the IAEA General Conference.[13]Answering to the former, Mr. Gideon Frank, Director General Israel Atomic Energy Commission at the International Atomic Energy Agency 47th General Conference has underlined that
…It is Israel’s view that after building trust between all the Middle East parties and establishing good neighborly relations among them, the time would also be ripe to move towards regional arms control and disarmament arrangements in the conventional, chemical, biological, and missiles domains. These gains would then hopefully culminate with the establishment of a mutually verifiable nuclear weapon free zone.[14]
As for Israel’s nuclear capability in numbers, there are different figures. The figures range from 400 deliverable thermonuclear and nuclear weapons[15] to 200 nuclear weapons.[16]The Federation of American Scientists have confirmed the nuclear capability and published photographs of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor in August 2000.[17]Dimona is the most important Israeli nuclear reactor.[18]The other is the highly enriched uranium light-water reactor at Nahel Soreq. Dimona is a heavy-water reactor, which is not under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. The Agency has no inspection authority in Israel, as former Director General Dr. El Baradei highlights: “The problem is not the Dimona reactor, but that Israel is outside the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The Dimona reactor, as we read, has been extracting plutonium for Israeli security needs since the mid-sixties.”[19]Although previous reports have alleged that Israel began projects to enrich uranium using gas centrifuge and laser separation techniques in the 1980s, photos of the Space Imaging Corporation’s IKONOS satellite provided important clues as to the amount of plutonium and enriched uranium the reactor can produce.[20]The size of the reactor at Dimona is declared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be 26 megawatts (thermal). However, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who worked at Dimona for eight years, reported that the reactor had been scaled up twice before he arrived at the site in 1977. The first scale-up was from 26MWt to 70MWt; the second was to some higher level.[21]Depending upon the above figures Wisconsin Project Report estimates that Israel may have up to 175 bombs worth of plutonium in its nuclear arsenal today. A nonproliferation expert, Cordesman, reports that “based on estimates of the plutonium production capacity of the Dimona reactor, Israel has approximately 100-200 advanced nuclear explosive devices but such estimates are based on nominal production figures. They do not address yield, design, or the mix of fission, boosted, and thermonuclear weapons”.[22]Global Security estimates a total stockpile of between 200 and 375 weapons by the end of 2005.[23] However, it is impossible to estimate the exact size of Israel's arsenal without knowing Dimona's true operating history and the characteristics of Israeli nuclear weapon designs. In addition, Israel has a wide range of delivery means. Israel’s nuclear weapons can be delivered by its ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or aircraft.
Having outlined the Israeli nuclear capability, it is important to note that Israeli policy of nuclear opacity is being questioned. Avner Cohen argues that the policy has become anachronistic and counterproductive because unlike in the early days of her nuclear program, Israel now faces concerns of legitimacy, recognition, and responsibility: The policy curtails the need and right of Israeli citizens to be informed about who decides on the use of nuclear weapons and under what circumstances they would be used.[24]He goes on to argue that nuclear opacity also prevents Israel from making a convincing case that Israel’s nuclear policy is one of defensive last resort. Opacity also prevents Israel from participating in regional and global nonproliferation and arms control efforts. Significantly, he argues that
Israel needs to recognize, moreover, that the Middle East peace process is linked to the issue of nuclear weapons in the region. International support for Israel and its opaque bomb is being increasingly eroded by its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and the policies that support that occupation. Such criticism of these policies might well spill over into the nuclear domain, making Israel vulnerable to the charge that it is a nuclear-armed pariah state, and thus associating it to an uncomfortable degree with today’s rogue Iranian regime. Indeed, while almost all states publicly oppose the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, there is also growing support for dealing with this problem in an “evenhanded” manner, namely, by establishing a nuclear weapons free zone across the entire region.[25]
References
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[1] Cohen, Avner and Marvin, Miller. 2010. “Bringing Israel's Bomb Out of the Basement” The New York Times/International Herald Tribune Op-Ed, August 25, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25iht-edcohen.html
[2] Cohen, Avner. 1998. Israel and the Bomb New York: Columbia University Press. Regarding the book, The Nuclear Threat Initiative notes the following, “When the author published his book-a political history of the Israeli nuclear project until 1970 based on some exclusive Israeli sources—the Israeli authorities interrogated him at length and considered filing charges against him, showing the sensitivity of the subject.” The Nuclear Threat Initiative, Israel Profile-Nuclear Overview, http://nti.org/e_research/profiles/Israel/Nuclear/index.html
[3] The Nuclear Threat Initiative, Israel Profile-Nuclear Overview, http://nti.org/e_research/profiles/Israel/Nuclear/index.html
[4] “Peres admits to Israeli Nuclear Capability”, IsraelWire, 14 July 1998 and Federation of American Scientists, http://www.fas.org/news/israel/980714-israel1.htm
[5] Farr, Warner D. (LTC, U.S. Army) 1999. The Third Temple’s Holy of Holies: Israel’s Nuclear Weapons The Counterproliferation Papers, Future Warfare Series No. 2 USAF Counterproliferation Center Air War College Air University Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama-http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/farr.htm
[6] “Former Official Says France Helped Build Israel's Dimona Complex.” Nucleonics Week October 16, 1986; Cohen, Avner. 1995. “Most Favored Nation.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 51, no. 1 January-February; Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, pp. 73-75; Pean, Pierre. 1981. Les Deux Bombes, Paris: Fayard; In early 2007, a biography about Shimon Peres was published which revealed new information regarding the signing of the French-Israeli nuclear deal: Bar-Zohar, Michael. 2007. Shimon Peres: the biography New York: Random House.
[7] Cohen, Avner. 1998. Israel and The Evolution of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy: The Critical Decade (1958-1968) The Nonproliferation Review, Winter, pp.1-19; Cohen, Avner. 1995. “Most Favored Nation” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 51 January-February, pp. 44-53; Cohen, Avner. 1995. “Israel’s Nuclear History: The Untold Kennedy-Eshkol Dimona Correspondence”, The Journal of Israeli History 16 Summer, pp. 159-194; Shalom, Zaki. 1996. “Kennedy, Ben Gurion and the Dimona Project 1960-63”, Israel Studies 1 Spring,pp. 3-33; Hersh, Seymour M. 1991. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy New York: Random House; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1953: Dwight D. Eisenhower Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960.
[8] Sublette, Carey. “Report on the Vela Incident”, http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Safrica/Vela/html; http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Safrica/Vela.html; McGreal, Chris; McCarthy, Rory and Smith, David, 2010. Guardian, “Israeli president denies offering nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa-Shimon Peres dismisses claims relating to secret files but US researcher says denials are disingenuous”, 24 May, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/m
ay/24/israel-shimon-peres-nuclear-weapons
[9] Federation of American Scientists, http://www.fas.org/news/israel/980714-israel1.htm; “Peres admits to Israeli Nuclear Capability”, IsraelWire, 14 July 1998; Global Security, “Peres Admits to Israeli Nuclear Capability” http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/israel/980714-israel1.htm
[10] Tablet Magazine-Interview by Benny Morris, July 26, 2010 7:00am http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/40409/making-history/print/
[11] Andemicael, Berhanykun. “Challenges for Effective WMD Verification” IAEA Publications, Bulletin 48/1, http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines
/Bulletin/Bull481/htmls/wmd_verification.html
[12] The Nuclear Threat Initiative-Global Security Newswire, “U.N. Chief Urges Ratification of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty”, Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20110815_1520.php; “UN chief urges ratification on nuclear test ban treaty”, OneIndianews, Saturday September 24, 2011, http://news.oneindia.in/2011/09/24/un-chief-urg
es-ratification-on-nuclear-test-ban-treaty.html
[13] IAEA General Conference GC (50)17 Fiftieth Regular Session Item 21 of the provisional agenda (GC(50)/1) “Israeli Nuclear Capabilities and Threat”, 8 September 2006. http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC5
0/GC50Documents/English/gc50-17_en.pdf
[14] Statement by Mr. Gideon Frank, Director General Israel Atomic Energy Commission at the International Atomic Energy Agency 47th General Conference, p. 6 http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC47/Statements/israel.pdf
[15] Farr, Warner D. (LTC, U.S. Army) 1999. The Third Temple’s Holy of Holies: Israel’s Nuclear Weapons The Counterproliferation Papers, Future Warfare Series No. 2 USAF Counterproliferation Center Air War College Air University Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama-http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/farr.htm
[16] Federation of American Scientists, Memorandum submitted by Sir Cyril Townsend, Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/uk_wmd/407ap23.htm, According to this source, The American Department of Energy places Israel sixth in the atomic big-league with 300 to 500 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium.
[17] Federation of American Scientistst (FAS), Nuclear Weapons, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/; “Israel 'may have 200 nuclear weapons'”BBC News Online, Wednesday, 23 August, 2000, 16:48 GMT 17:48 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/892941.stm; “Photos Reveal Israeli Nuclear Capacity”, Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. 2 No.8, 5 September 2000; “Israel’s nuclear reactor on the World Wide Web”, IsraelWire, Thursday, August 17, 2000.
[18] Center for Nonproliferation Studies, http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/israel.htm; Davis, Douglas. 1998. “Defense Officials Said Urging Nuclear Second-Strike Capability” Jerusalem Post, August 6, pp. 1-3.
[19] Transcript of the Director General´s Interview with Al-Ahram News http://iaea.org/newscenter/transcripts/2004/alahram27072004.html
[20] Steinberg, Gerald. 1997. “Accountability and Confidentiality in Israeli Military Procurement” Prepared for Presentation at the Conference on Political Control of Bureaucracy in Democratic Systems, Political Science Association, February 16-18.
[21] Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, 1996. Israel: Plutonium Production The Risk Report Volume 2 Number 4, July-August, http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/plut.html
[22] Cordesman, Anthony H. 2010. “The Influence of Regional Military Threats on Israeli Security: Playing Three Dimensional Chess Without Rules” Center for Strategic and International Studies CSIS Revised Report August 26, p. 64.
[23]“Israeli Nuclear Stockpile” Global Security, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/israel/nuke-stockpile.htm
[24] Cohen, Avner and Marvin, Miller. 2010. “Bringing Israel's Bomb Out of the Basement” The New York Times/International Herald Tribune Op-Ed, August 25, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25iht-edcohen.html
[25] Cohen, Avner and Marvin, Miller. 2010. “Bringing Israel's Bomb Out of the Basement” The New York Times/International Herald Tribune Op-Ed, August 25, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/opinion/25iht-edcohen.html
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